The colourful Pikmin are back after a very long wait, this time on the Wii U.

That David’s a fake, but a lot of people don’t care. Why pay $34 to see the real thing in the Uffizi around the corner? The outdoor one’s free, and it’s the same, right? Wrong. The real David, which differs from the fake by just a few millimeters here and there, is breathtaking. He’s alive. If you touched his neck you’d expect a pulse. It feels like he could climb down from his pedestal at any moment and shake your hand.

It’s hard to say what makes the real David so magical and the phony so dull. But whatever it is, Nintendo’s got some at their office. They put a few drops into Pikmin 3.

Sure the graphics are great, and the music is great, and the gameplay is great. That’s not what I’m talking about. The mysterious N factor in Nintendo’s first party titles is something else. It starts with the way the games feel. They feel good. They feel confident, and the confidence is contagious. Five minutes into Pikmin 3, I was more excited about playing the game than I was when I bought it.

And that first five minutes immersed me beautifully back into the Pikmin world. If you’re new to this series, here’s how it works: You’re a little spaceman (actually, 3 this time) on a distant planet. You find yourself the leader of a race of small and fragile sprouts. These are the pikmin. Together, you and your pikmin must solve puzzles, collect supplies and fight off the voracious other inhabitants of this earthy garden landscape.

Pikmin games are unique in their ability to be gentle and intense at the same time. In the Tropical Wilds area, I came across a delicious bunch of grapes and a big yellow lemon. Such fruit is very valuable, so I dispatched twenty of my fastest red pikmin to strip the grapes and bring them back to my spaceship. As I was assigning a big team of yellow pikmin to carry the heavy lemon, there was the sound of fighting in the bushes. My pikmin counter began to drop. Racing down the path, I found a fat red ladybird gobbling up the red pikmin as they ran past with their grapes. The price of my negligence? The lives of 16 of my pikmin friends, who died with cute little sighs.

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Such casualties are common, either by accident, or in the course of a boss fight, or sometimes thanks to the game’s occasional pathfinding problems. But however it happens, you never get used to losing pikmin. It’s not that they are hard to replace (actually, they’re totally disposable), it’s more emotional than that. You get attached to the little guys. If they die, you feel like you’ve failed them. I’ll delete veteran units in Civilization V simply because they’d take too long to walk back to my city - but I ran frantically around the Garden of Hope for five minutes to rescue one stranded pikmin, because I couldn’t bear to leave him behind.

Maybe that’s the secret of the N factor - the ability to make you care. Such personal investment turns a game into an experience, and a release into an event. Its shadow alone sells new consoles. It makes metroids fly and the triforce glow.

If you own a Wii-U, games like Pikmin 3 are the reason. Get it.

- Andrew Masters

Screen Play readers can submit articles and game reviews for consideration in Your Turn and Your Review using the email address SPYourTurn@gmail.com. The best blog post published on Screen Play between 1 August and 31 August 2013, as judged by James Dominguez, will win a PS Vita handheld console from Sony Computer Entertainment Australia. This is a wi-fi unit, and has a recommended retail price of $349. The August prize winner will be announced in the first week of September. Only Australian residents are eligible and the judge's decision is final.